March 21, 2010 / energy
It has been documented that the Chinese were using coal as early as 1000 BC to bake porcelain. The ancient Greeks also wrote about it in their history. In the Western countries, many of the forests ha
March 21, 2010 / energy
Wind is one very usable energy resource that can be traced back thousands of years. the first mechanical device that was built to use the wind as a source of power was a sailboat. Larger ships and sai
March 20, 2010 / Earth
Nitrogen is an essential component of all living things, yet only a small amount of the planet's stock of nitrogen is in a form that living things can absorb. This is "fixed" out of the air by bacteri
March 19, 2010 / Earth, disasters
Individual species may not matter much on their own, but collectively they form ecosystems that provide a range of vital "ecosystem services", such as recycling waste, cleaning water, absorbing carbon
March 17, 2010 / Earth
Humans now control most of the world's rivers, damming and diverting many of them to death. Thanks to us, a quarter of the world's river systems no longer reach the ocean for at least part of the year
March 15, 2010 / Earth, global warming
The ozone hole that formed in the stratosphere over Antarctica in the 1970s was a classic example of an environmental tipping point. Ozone-destroying chemicals built up in the frigid stratosphere unti
March 10, 2010 / Earth, global warming
This is a relatively new issue, rarely discussed until 10 years ago. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means more is absorbed by the oceans, creating carbonic acid. Since the industrial revolution
March 9, 2010 / Earth, global warming
Ever since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (or one word IPCC) 2007 report on the impacts of climate change was discovered to contain a major error that the Himalayan glaciers wil
Record high prices at American gas pumps and continued trouble-brewing in the Middle East, Nigeria, and other areas of importance to the oil-driven economy have made it clear to Americans that we are
March 5, 2010 / Earth, disasters
Earthquakes occur when two tectonic plates move suddenly one against each other. The rocks breaks underground at hypocenter and the earth shakes. Those waves spread to epicenter, point on the Earth su
We should be doing everything possible to develop geothermal energy technologies. This is a largely untapped area of tremendous alternative energy potential, as it simply taps the energy being natural
February 18, 2010 / energy
There is a lot of energy that we can harness if we only seek to research and develop the technologies needed to do so. We can get away from the fossil fuels and the old electrical grids by turning to
February 18, 2010 / space
While it was just a TV show, that little speech at the beginning of the original Star Trek show really did do a good job of capturing our feelings about space. It is those feelings that drive our
February 18, 2010 / energy
Many researchers believe that harnessing the power of the atom in fission reactions is the most significant alternative energy resource that we have, for the fact of the immense power that it can gene
